Objective measurement of spindle orientation in early Caenorhabditis elegans embryo.

The spindle orientation is a crucial piece of information to understand the development of embryo. The spindle forms during cell division and the cell divides along the spindle axis. Spindle orientation was measured in many different mutant embryos of Caenrohabditis elegans.

Detection of nuclei in 4D Nomarski DIC microscope images of early Caenorhabditis elegans embryos using local image entropy and object tracking.

Background: The ability to detect nuclei in embryos is essential for studying the development of multicellular organisms. A system of automated nuclear detection has already been tested on a set of four-dimensional (4D) Nomarski differential interference contrast (DIC) microscope images of Caenorhabditis elegans embryos. However, the system needed laborious hand-tuning of its parameters every time a new image set was used.